“I always tell people to wear thick rubber gloves if you’re stabbing someone in a frenzy,” she says, lest your hands slip and you accidentally leave your own blood at the scene.

It might be grim advice, but Porter, who has written three books on true crime, says that more often than not criminals are careless enough to get easily caught.

As a writer, though, it makes choosing crimes to include in her books easier; only about one in a thousand are worth reading about, according to her.

“Choosing cases is in a way very easy, as most real-life cases rule themselves out by being simply too boring or banal to write about,” she says.

“You choose the crimes that are most like fiction. I look for the kind of setups that wouldn’t be out of place in a crime novel or a CSI script.”

Although she writes about their real-life counterparts now, it was the crime fiction novels and television shows such as Silent Witness in the late ’90s that sparked her interest in the genre.

As a then legal affairs reporter with the Sunday Age, she picked up the phone and rang the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, running her first forensics story soon after.

“I was just curious. You know that question, ‘What is it really like?’ When you’re a journo, you can just pick up the phone and they’ll say ‘Come and see’,” Porter says.

A few years later she wrote a similar piece on a case with the Victorian Police in 2003 and not long afterwards publishers were knocking on the door asking her if there were more stories, culminating in her first book Written On The Skin.

Unlike typical crime books, Porter isn’t interested in writing about the one big crime, but rather the forensics behind it.

“I was hooked on the science of it and the magic of the way that a forensic expert could actually read the information in front of him or her. Much of the true-crime genre tends to focus on what the criminals do and I’m interested in what the good guys and girls do.”

In her new book Crime Scene Asia, Porter investigates some extraordinary cases in South-East Asia from Singapore to Hong Kong, where forensic evidence was crucial to solving the mysteries, sometimes overturning judges’ decisions.

“I write about cases where the forensics was used in a good way and it was used to either convict the guilty or exonerate the innocent, which is what happened in all the cases that I’ve chosen.”

True to her word, the cases she has chosen for this book could have come from a CSI episode.

They include one of Hong Kong’s most ambitious bombing plots, with gangsters named “The Big Spender” and the “King of Thieves” and a truck driver caught up in it all, and her favourite case in the book, Unknown Male One, in which a man charged with the murder of his girlfriend is saved by the work of forensic scientists.

“That’s why forensic science is so important; if you care to look at it and see if it’s there, that forensic evidence will tell you the truth,” Porter says.

Melbourne-based Porter was inspired to begin the book when she was in Singapore for a writers and translators conference and noticed a lack of true crime on the shelves in a bookstore. A whole row of books on feng shui lined the walls, with only three shelves of true crime.

In hindsight, she says the disparity should have been a clear message saying “they’re not interested, don’t do it”.

None of the scientists she approached were willing to talk.

“The huge challenge was the scientists, and I’m used to scientists talking to me. At the risk of sounding egotistical, I think I have in Australia a good reputation as being a responsible, accurate journalist who is trustworthy,” she says.

In Crime Scene Asia, Porter takes on the momentous task of writing up the 2002 Bali bombings that claimed 202 lives, including 88 Australians.

As with the rest of the cases, an incredible story unravels involving the Indonesian and Australian police, with AFP scientist David Royds making his case-breaking discovery like something straight out of CSI.

She details the moment Royds suspected a suicide bomber was behind the attack, but had to keep it to himself when the local authorities were downplaying terrorist activity.

All it took was for him to look up at the ceiling when everyone else was looking down.

Despite the significance of the case to Australians, Porter ensures she stays away from the sensitivity around the victims and their relatives.

READ A BOOK EXTRACT ON THE BALI BOMBING

“I’m always aware of the fact that victims and families might read it.

“That’s why I tend to focus on the science because I feel when you’re dealing with relatives there’s almost nothing you can write that’s potentially going to be right,” Porter says.

“It’s very easy to offend people without meaning to. I’m actually happiest writing about the science and keeping it away from the victims.”

People might think that Porter has ice in her veins when she tells people she isn’t affected by the terrible material she often writes about. And in one way at least, that’s true.

“I’m a Brighton Iceberger,” she laughs. “I swim in the icy waters of Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay right through the winter without a wetsuit, even when it gets down to 8C.”